Jonathan Street has posted an article called Is PHP good enough for science? where he asks if anyone has experience with PHP in scientific contexts. I think PHP easily could be used to automate tasks, but I’m not aware of any toolkits or frameworks created for this purpose. Anyone seen anything like this around? If so, drop him a line.

Hia there. I’ve now moved my old blog to a self-hosted domain. This was mainly done to be free of the constraints that the wordpress hosting lays on you. As you might have noticed I’m experimenting with Google Adsense on various parts of the site. I’m sticking to text-only ads, and I’m trying to make them as non-intrusive as possible. If anyone has feedback or comments on this, I’d really like to hear from you.

Let’s say we have a SOAP method called createCustomer(Customer c), and we have a base class called Customer, which has to subclasses, Person and Organization. Person has firstname, lastname, while Organization as orgname and orgid. Now, the createCustomer call accepts a object of the class Customer, and any derived classes.

When retrieving a Person / Organization over SOAP, PHP automatically creates instances of the correct classes, but when calling createCustomer, passing a Person / Organization it breaks. Out object is sent as a Customer, but with Person or Organization fields added. The SOAP server expects to find a xsi:type for the object we are sending to tell what kind of Customer it is. It seems like PHP does not set this itself (maybe it should?).

I spent quite some time looking for info on how to specify the xsi:type for the objects, and I finally came across SoapVar.

I created a base class which the SOAP classes extended. A method called pack is responsible for setting xsi:type.

(I’m very aware that my pasted code looks like a mess in this blog. I will fix that ASAP).

I guess I didn’t make the purpose quite clear here. This method will allow you to show custom error messages when PHP hits a fatal error. The shutdown function will always run.

Scripts tend to die, and that’s not usually nice. We do not want to show the user a fatal error nor a blank page (display errors off) . PHP has a function called register_shutdown_function which lets us set up a function which is called at execution shutdown. What this means is that our function will be executed when our script is done executing / dying and PHP execution is about to shut down. By setting up a variable to false at the start of our script, and setting it to true at the very end of the script we can have our shutdown function check if the script completed successfully or not. If our variable is still false we know that we never made it to the last line of our script, hence it died somewhere. I’ve prepared a very basic sample which shows how you can give the user some proper feedback if a fatal error should arise. You’d want to turn of display of fatal errors for this to look nice.

As you can see, the shutdown_func prints something if the clean variable isn’t set to true when the shutdown function runs. This should of course be wrapped in a class (and NOT use globals), and for something more usable I recommend checking EZ Components way of doing this.